Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER takes place in the fantastical land known as the Zone
STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Ave. at 40th St.
Wednesday, March 20, free, 7:00
www.nypl.org
Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. Stalker is screening for free March 20 at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of the series “Three Auteurs of World Cinema,” which began with six films by Wong Kar-wai and continues with Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice on March 27 before presenting eight works by Federico Fellini beginning April 10 with I Vitteloni.